Empire of Ash: A Passionate Paranormal Romance with Young Adult Appeal (God of Secrets Book 1)

floor, making my way to the supply closet. Thankfully, the tall cabinet remains upright and its thin steel doors are still shut but not for long because compasses, measuring tapes, plumb bobs, and more lurch for freedom the instant I turn the handle. I duck and cover my head until the avalanche finishes.
“Damn,” I mumble under my breath.
“You okay there, Pell?” Jude asks, pausing from giving assignments.
Peachy, can’t you tell? I bite back my retort as all eight males stare at me. No guys, no need to offer a girl a little help.
Irik silent claps, out of Jude’s line of sight.
I ignore him.
“I’m fine, sorry,” I reply.
I start returning things to their proper shelves, but Jude interrupts me over the noise I create, “Pell, how about we clean things up later.”
I bob my head and swallow a huff. Fine.
Grabbing a heavy-duty Maglite flashlight from the scattered equipment, I hightail it out of the tent before Jude changes his mind.
As the tent flap slides shut behind me, I exhale heavily.
Men.
A strong gust of rain-slicked wind tears into me before I can grumble more, and I zip my mud-stained parka as the cold takes another bite out of me; only residual heat from my lingering anger keeps me warm. I don my headlamp, pull up my hood, and thrust my hands into my pockets. Cradling the flashlight in the crook of my arm, I set off toward the secret stairway and cistern on the far side of the site.
I pity the ancient Mycenaeans. This weather tests even the hardiest of folk, and I’m not one. No doubt, it was a contributing factor to their demise.
The wind continues buffeting me as I hike across the site that’s vacant save for the wheelbarrows, picks, shovels, and a host of other digging equipment. My socks grow wet as my boots squelch in puddles that have grown too big to avoid as I skirt around the plethora of perfectly square excavation pits that can’t be worked again until the standing water evaporates.
Just two more years of fieldwork and I can apply for a curator position at pretty much any museum. It’s been my ambition since early on.
No one becomes an archeologist to get rich. Fieldwork is backbreaking; the repetitive actions, day in and day out, especially when cold and damp seep into your limbs and produce ongoing physical health issues. It’s why Jude won’t be checking on any of the dig sites himself today.
No, I’ve become an archeologist because I love discovering the unknown, filling in gaps in the history books. It’s what makes me get up every day. Well, that and… I rub the silver ring on my finger that bears a host of hieroglyphs. Never once have I taken it off.
My nose starts running, and I scrounge in my pocket and find a tissue as I press on. Will I ever be warm or dry again?
The Mycenaeans were the most powerful Bronze Age kingdom and lasted nearly five hundred years. Considering my home, the United States, has existed for not quite half that long and our political environment has already become toxic, I have nothing but respect for them.
They were a warring people, ruled by military leaders, who pillaged and robbed their neighbors, bringing them power and prosperity. Their settlements were heavily fortified with colossal perimeter walls that protected them if their neighbors decided to fight back. Perhaps we can take a few lessons from them, not the pillaging part, but in maintaining order and discipline in their leadership.
I follow what remains of the city wall to my left and pass the site of the postern gate; soon I approach the cistern at the farthest corner of the massive wall. Its arched entrance is the only opening in the towering surface of rough-hewn stone.
The secret stairway is a set of ninety-nine steps down to a cistern deep beneath the wall that was connected by pipes running under it to a spring outside. The cistern is a stroke of genius, if you ask me, because it protected their water supply in times of siege, even if they were the aggressors most times and deserved whatever pushback they got.
I wipe drizzle from my face and squint through the driving raindrops. Conditions make the light dim, so I switch on my headlamp as well as the flashlight as I stop before the opening and peer in. The light bounces back from the haze that obscures the curving stone stairway and the chalky smell of newly exposed limestone fills my nostrils.
My heart sinks.
How much history has been destroyed?

Chapter Two
Rain pelts my backside, and my stomach tenses as I squint through the dust at the huge limestone blocks that have been crafted to form the ceiling above the stairway. They remind me of two tall stacks of books that have toppled into one another and whose tops now rest against each other.
There’s no mortar, not that after all these eons it would hold, and I can’t tell if the quake has shifted one or several of the blocks, leaving the slightest jarring—like an aftershock while I’m down there—to make them fall like a house of cards.
But there’s no way I’m going back and asking for help. Just shoot me. I’d never hear the end of it.
Gold eye. Silver eye. Gold eye. Silver eye.
I force myself to envision those sparkling eyes once more, and when I have them firmly in mind, I blow out a long breath, telling myself it isn’t my time to die, not under a pile of fallen rock. What an anticlimactic way to go. That won’t be this girl’s end. It won’t.
My imaginary god who’s always calmed me seems to agree, at least that’s my story as a strong gust of wind pushes me forward.
“Okay. Okay. I’m